This is many years of experience talking: the people who are successful and influential in the present order of things (on every level of society) are, by and large, not good people, and the sense of reality that they create in their interactions is not a good world -- despite the structures of postwar industrial prosperity, and the fact that the trucks of frozen hamburgers still roll into town every week. Perhaps it was ever thus, but it most certainly is thus.
Look to the past. Piece together a world from the relics.